Quick Links

Club PA 2.0 has arrived! If you'd like to access some extra PA content and help support the forums, check it out at patreon.com/ClubPA

The image size limit has been raised to 1mb! Anything larger than that should be linked to. This is a HARD limit, please do not abuse it.

Our new Indie Games subforum is now open for business in G&T. Go and check it out, you might land a code for a free game. If you're developing an indie game and want to post about it, follow these directions. If you don't, he'll break your legs! Hahaha! Seriously though.

Our rules have been updated and given their own forum. Go and look at them! They are nice, and there may be new ones that you didn't know about! Hooray for rules! Hooray for The System! Hooray for Conforming!

[Board Games] Space Alert owns. Like, a lot.

Posts

speaking of the CIA. I'm trying to get a trade going where I would get Cold War: CIA vs KGB which is similar to blackjack (As Battle Line is similar to poker) and also 1960. For some reason I always assumed 1960 was a lot like twilight struggle, but after looking into it more I think it could see some play time.

Also remember when Smallworld came out and there was a megathread concerning how sexist it was because the one female race in it was Amazons and they were chesty in tiny jungle clothes?

But I would think you couldn't accuse Small World of being sexist now that more females have been added to the game with expansions! The one expansion was even devoted entirely to more female races. So now there are quite a few female races to choose from that are chesty in tiny outfits...

It's actually more a fusion of Dominion and Munchkin, only with significantly less backstabbing. In fact, it's probably closer to Thunderstone, but I haven't played that so I feel uncertain in making such a comment.

It's actually more a fusion of Dominion and Munchkin, only with significantly less backstabbing. In fact, it's probably closer to Thunderstone, but I haven't played that so I feel uncertain in making such a comment.

The Resident Evil Deck building game is Thunderstone without all the problems of Thunderstone. My group calls it Thunderstone 1.5 jokingly. It's a fun game. Not quite as elegant as Dominion, and definitely doesn't have the card variation of Dominion, but in terms of building a deck and fighting a monster, I think it's much much better than Thunderstone. Plus, for $30, it's pretty cheap.

1. The rules are horrible and unclear. How long has the game been out and they're already up to version 1.4? (Maybe the rules suffer in comparison to Dominion which has perfect rules)

2. Game length. Thunderstone seems to just drag on and on. The whole mechanic of "light" and adding and subtracting is overly complex and cumbersome. Resident Evil fixes this with "ammo." You need X amount of ammo to shoot your gun. If you have X+, you're good, if not, you can't shoot.

3. No real risk of losing a battle.

4. The mechanics are overly complex and cumbersome. (see above).

5. The randomness of the monsters can severely impact the "fun-factor" of the game. Get a bad batch of early monsters and the game just bogs down.

6. The symbols on the cards are hard to read, understand, and are sometimes counter-intuitive. The design on Thunderstone just phones it in, and throws all that data on the card without meaningful symbology to indicate what's what. About the only two things that don't suck on these cards is light level provided, and gold provided. This means that as a player, you essentially have to memorize what each location means and go from there and that sucks, they could have done much better.

Maybe the expansion fixes these problems, but I, and my gaming group, just find ourselves getting frustrated with this game a lot. We want the simplicity and elegance of Dominion with the thematic tie-in of Thunderstone. Resident Evil solves this problem.

I never liked thunderstone as much as Dominion (it's more luck based than dominion and still takes as long) but now that Ascension is out there really is no reason to ever play Thunderstone again (though I'd still prefer Dominion + expansions usually). They did such a better job with the same general concept.

Also, I've got to try several new games lately (local game shop has an excellent wednesday night open gaming and provides store copies of most everything) and here are some ramblings:

2038: It's a very hard to come by 18xx game (train building + stock manipulation series). I'll preface this by saying I love 18xx games and 1870 is probably the best board game I have ever played (right behind Dune). That said, 2038 is terrible. It's "18xx without knives". They kept the long playtime and sometimes tedious mechanics and tried to make the game friendlier by taking out any and all means to screw over other players (trashing stock, dumping companies, blocking routes etc...). While this might make the game seem less "mean" to a newb the result is that there is basicially no way to close even a small gap in score. The game is pretty much determined about 1/5th of the way in but you still have to grind to the inevitable conclusion.

Pheonica: Out of the 5 people who played I liked this the best and would rate it as "meh, not bad". It's almost exactly like Sceptor of Savandor but not as good so I doubt it will see the light of day again. There are real problems with card design (way too many houses) and there isn't a single building in the game you need to "save up" for (even the largest can be bought with 1 turn of income by the time you are that late in the game).

Merkator: Another "meh, not bad" game. The main problem is that the winner of the game will be the one that has a good synergy going between their goods / cards and their bonus victory point cards. However, you have no idea which cards you'll have a shot at during most of the game while you are setting up for position so it's mostly luck of the draw who stumbles into cards which match what they areadly (blindly) happened to do.

So, a buddy of mine and I have slowly been getting into the board game scene over the past six months... picked up Dominion Intrigue this week. I enjoy it a lot, but it seems that it's pretty hands off from interaction. Are we just not getting very interactive sets when we randomize? Also, how much does the game change when you bump it up to three or four players?

I'm also pretty sure that I'm receiving Pandemic for Christmas. Extremely excited about that. I really feel elementary compared to some of the games that you guys are mentioning - again, all we have so far are the big names - Catan, Ticket, Carc...

So, a buddy of mine and I have slowly been getting into the board game scene over the past six months... picked up Dominion Intrigue this week. I enjoy it a lot, but it seems that it's pretty hands off from interaction. Are we just not getting very interactive sets when we randomize? Also, how much does the game change when you bump it up to three or four players?

I'm also pretty sure that I'm receiving Pandemic for Christmas. Extremely excited about that. I really feel elementary compared to some of the games that you guys are mentioning - again, all we have so far are the big names - Catan, Ticket, Carc...

Playing a random game isn't a good way to play Dominion if you specifically want interaction as depending on your card pool you could end up with many games with few to no interactive cards. I'd say to specifically choose the set of cards, or choose a few interactive cards and random the rest, to produce the interactive game you want.

So, a buddy of mine and I have slowly been getting into the board game scene over the past six months... picked up Dominion Intrigue this week. I enjoy it a lot, but it seems that it's pretty hands off from interaction. Are we just not getting very interactive sets when we randomize? Also, how much does the game change when you bump it up to three or four players?

I'm also pretty sure that I'm receiving Pandemic for Christmas. Extremely excited about that. I really feel elementary compared to some of the games that you guys are mentioning - again, all we have so far are the big names - Catan, Ticket, Carc...

Playing a random game isn't a good way to play Dominion if you specifically want interaction as depending on your card pool you could end up with many games with few to no interactive cards. I'd say to specifically choose the set of cards, or choose a few interactive cards and random the rest, to produce the interactive game you want.

We have been playing random just to get a feel of what cards can do what. We're slowly starting to develop some basic strategies though, starting to get better at learning how to link the most actions possible together, etc.

Name a single historical period ever (including the present) that would provide a setting that meets the modern standards for racism, sexism etc...

Seriously, even if taken literally Peurto Rico is pretty politicially correct by the standards of human history.

Yeah, also this. I was going to add something in my post about what dicks the Romans generally were. Slavery, bloodsports, racism, imperialism etc. But no one complains about Civilization/Republic of Rome/Hannibal.

Name a single historical period ever (including the present) that would provide a setting that meets the modern standards for racism, sexism etc...

Seriously, even if taken literally Peurto Rico is pretty politicially correct by the standards of human history.

Yeah, also this. I was going to add something in my post about what dicks the Romans generally were. Slavery, bloodsports, racism, imperialism etc. But no one complains about Civilization/Republic of Rome/Hannibal.

"if everything is racist, then nothing is!!" is not really a good argument, sorry pal.

anyway I am at the airport, my flight is delayed an hour and a half, and I am Mean Drunk. who wants to play dominion.

Always liked AGoT-bidding and the inevitable waiting for mustering to be drawn always provides lots of tension-more fun if you've read the books but in no way necessary-can suck for some players that get picked on/wildling attacked and don't have a good chance of getting back in the game but still have 1-2 hrs left-the clash of kings expansion is only really necessary if you want/need a 6th player-one rule from it is the addition of ports-which is now considered necessary in the base game anyway-but you can just add the rule, don't need the expansion

A Game of Thrones is great. Don't know about expansions, except the harbour rules which are apparently necessary to repair the base game, and the extra house Martell which is fine I guess, if you don't lose all your troops to wildlings, Darian.

It's extra fun if you've read the books, but even without it's a great game. Fantasy Diplomacy ++.

Always liked AGoT-bidding and the inevitable waiting for mustering to be drawn always provides lots of tension-more fun if you've read the books but in no way necessary-can suck for some players that get picked on/wildling attacked and don't have a good chance of getting back in the game but still have 1-2 hrs left-the clash of kings expansion is only really necessary if you want/need a 6th player-one rule from it is the addition of ports-which is now considered necessary in the base game anyway-but you can just add the rule, don't need the expansion

In other news, I know someone posted Cally's character card for the BSG: Exodus expansion already, but has everyone seen the others?

A Game of Thrones is great. Don't know about expansions, except the harbour rules which are apparently necessary to repair the base game, and the extra house Martell which is fine I guess, if you don't lose all your troops to wildlings, Darian.

It's extra fun if you've read the books, but even without it's a great game. Fantasy Diplomacy ++.

This is a favourite of my group. After trying lots of the expansion pieces we've come to a equilibrium on the Storm of Sword leader cards (clash of kings get out of control), Ports, NON-unique one time orders only, wildling cards, and the newer event cards ( I, II, III). fortifications and sieges seemed out of place, and the unique one time orders just seemed weird.

Gives a balanced galaxy set up (in the sense that all starting positions are equivalent), so it works fine. With 3p, you have to be careful about battling - any battle will likely cause the two players involved to both lose ships, weakening them in comparison to the third player, but the base game doesn't reward battling much, anyway (few of the base objectives require offensive action).